New members join, but don't post. What worked for your community?

Most common problem online communities face is - new members join, but do not post. They just read a few posts, some like content and then never return.

I faced this problem in the early days of CrazyEngineers. I remember we had about 1000 members but only 5 members would return and participate. The member count kept growing but the active member count didn't.

What worked for me was giving up on the crowd. I started focusing on the active members, the ones who really cared for the community.

I DM'd them and asked follow-up questions.
I praised them openly and through DMs
I was proactive in recognising their contributions

Those little actions added and slowly a few other members started participating. But that was back in 2006 - almost 20 years ago. I want to know what's working for you?

We think about this a lot internally.

The indicator I keep coming back to is the time to first interaction ... not the time to first post.

Expecting someone to ask a question or write a reply right after they sign up is a big ask. New members are still figuring things out and not sure if the room will accept them. That's why even the introductions are harder to get from new members.

THink about lowest effort user can make to interact with the community. It could be as simple as a like, a vote on the poll or a simply yes or no question. Once the user has interacted with the community and received some positive feedback, their guard goes down.

In our Slack community, we replaced our greet bot with humans. Now whenever a new member joins, our mods send them a personal DM with a welcome message. We've been running this experiment for the past 2 months and the time to first interaction is already up by about 30%. That's how I know it works.

@kaustubh-katdare - we've spoken about setting up onboarding flows in Jatra. Any update on that front?

New members join, but don't post. What worked for your community?

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